Ep0 - China - 'Processing' - Closed

((Fairwinds and Barricade))

((Nemesis - Just Outside Megatron’s Quarters))

Fairwinds felt the Cybertronian equivalent of sick, her fuel tank churning and her systems overheated and strained from maintaining a tension akin to combat readiness. The cassette hadn’t moved from her perch for the entirety of the night - since Megatron had delivered his orders to her and sent her out to wait. When Barricade had arrived, blissfully oblivious to what he was about to walk into, she hadn’t been able to muster up the relief she would otherwise have felt at his return from Autobot captivity. Instead she’d just sent him in and intensified the dampening field inside. She didn’t want to hear her master die. Didn’t want to hear Barricade, who was as much kin to her as she could find, be the one to do it.

So she’d waited for the result of the phase displacement on Megatron’s spark, uttering more silent prayers to Primus for its success than she had ever offered to the deity in her long life. Her orders were clear if it were to fail, and she was resolved to carry them out. Ingesting the Commander’s processor was the surest way of containing and destroying the data it contained, and privately, she took some comfort in the fact that some of him would become a part of her. Small comfort, but something.

When the doors finally, suddenly opened hours after Barricade had gone inside, she braced herself for the worst. Barricade would be the one to have her go inside after he was finished. To the body. Her vents stalled when he just walked below her and away, leaving the doors to shut behind him. A quick scan inside confirmed that Megatron was alive and in healthy recharge, though Fairwind’s joy at that fact was quickly overpowered by sheer infuriated rage at the dark mech who’d just strode away.

Beak splitting with an unconscious hiss, the cassette lunged down from her perch and flew after him.

Cade wasn’t going to get away from Fairwinds, he knew that, but it was worth a shot on the off chance that the cassette would want to be with Megatron while he got his first clean recharge in weeks. The infiltrator left at speed for the repair bay, not looking at Fairwinds, not giving her even the slightest flux off his EM field as he left – as he was having trouble parsing his own emotional subroutines as they currently were. His head was still skewed, his thoughts at an angle, like someone had set him down on an incline and he was slightly off balance.

Sitting in the dark waiting for that to change, watching the Decepticon leader at rest – that had helped but he was still off. He wasn’t sure if that would go away or remain. He wasn’t very sure of anything and for an infiltrator that was a bad place to be in… and despite that, he felt a deep and fierce self-satisfaction. He heard Windy coming up after him, the small angry orbit of her EM field around her like a small heat lamp of rage. He didn’t turn to look at her.

“He’s recharging,” said Barricade, eyes forward. “You should stay with him.”

Fairwinds twisted around to hover in front of him at a snarl, talons raised to Barricade’s face and wings beating hard and fast, her thrusters keeping her aloft and in place. She clipped the side of his helm with one sharp flap and jerked back from his hand when it came up, optics flaming in the subdued light of the corridor.

“You fragging glitch, Cade,” she snapped, utterly mindless of the fact that Barricade could crush her in one hand with very little effort. “You left me out there worrying all night and now you just walk away? What’s your malfunction?”

“My job,” said Barricade with uncharacteristic coldness, “isn’t to fragging sooth your anxieties, Fairwinds.”

He moved past the flapping cassette, waving her off with the back of his hand and turning his face away from her as he walked past, EM field still tightly controlled. Cassettes held a strange place in Cybertronian society – they felt and suffered for the pains their carriers took and Cade had no illusions how bad it was waiting, knowing that your carrier might be offlined. He’d worked with Frenzy long enough, nearly died enough times, to have an idea how it was watching your bonded partner struggle. It had been eons since he’d lost Frenzy during the war and he wondered when, one day, he was going to feel that part of his own spark go dark.

“Look,” he said, voice sharp, made edgy by his own sense of disorientation, “it’s over. Things are back on the level. Isn’t that enough?”

Not when Barricade was acting weird, Fairwinds privately affirmed, shifting in front of him again trying to catch his optic. He wouldn’t look at her, wasn’t showing any of his usual attitude - Pit, she was shouting at him in the middle of the corridor with her talons up and he wasn’t even angry with her.

She knew perfectly well that Barricade had been ordered to terminate his Commander in cold blood if the phase shifter didn’t work. But it obviously had worked, and Barricade should have been out here on his highest plateau of smugness for effectively saving the Decepticon side from rule under Starscream or, worse, Shockwave. But instead there was this cagey, evasive mech trying to get away from her.

Manoeuvring to hover directly in front of his face again, watching his averted optics with her own narrowed ones, Fairwinds flared determined impatience at one of her oldest friends. “What’s with you? You saved the faction and now you’re sulking? What happened in there?”

“Fairwinds,” he said, again trying to maneuver past her, but she was making it difficult by darting in and out of his face like an aggressive humming bird. Short of swatting her or making an undignified break for it was unlikely she was going to let this drop and Cade needed some more time to get himself together. The after-effects of the bonding protocols were still playing havoc with his head, buzzing like a low tone through every plate and panel. He held up a hand to ward her off, but she just kept fluttering around his face.

“I’m going to medbay. Stop bothering me and just ask Megatron. Windy. Fraggin’ knock it off.” He glared at her finally. “Get out of the way or I swear to Primus I’m going to slag you!”

Undeterred the threat, and somewhat relieved that the stalwart mech was finally looking at her, Fairwinds immediately spotted the tell-tale brightness in Barricade’s optics. Specifically, the watery glow about the edges symptomatic of a recent and potent output of spark energy. She wouldn’t have seen it if she’d been any further from him.

“Oh that’s just lovely,” she drawled, eel-like tongue rasping over the words. “Leave me to rot whilst you get your ‘yay I didn’t have to murder you’ ‘face. Probably did his spark more harm than anything else after what it’s been through lately. If you...”

She trailed off without fully knowing why, some instinctive sense in her processor flashing urgently as the realization dawned. Barricade’s optics had looked away but she’d already seen it, and with her master so close, she could feel the minute warmth of it. Fairwinds froze, optics wide and beak falling slack. “Oh, by the All-”

Quick as a flash Cade snatched the cassette out of the air and clamped a hand over her beak. “Fairwinds!” he hissed, muffling her delighted shrieky squeaky sounds. “No. No. No. Shut up. Now or I will do some very Decepticon things right now. I’m not kidding. Shut up.” A flare of brief panic jolted him like a hit of electricity, blitzing his processor with thoughts of Shockwave or Starscream somehow overhearing anything about this. The immediate overshadow that would come from that, the change in regard by the other Cons, all the slag they’d tried to stop in the first place. Cade’s EM field flared unbearably bright and violent.

“Fairwinds do you understand me? Be quiet.”

Even if Barricade hadn’t been crushing her beak shut, which she was too stunned to be agitated by, Fairwinds still would have gone into a highly encrypted comm. frequency from his tone alone. ::’Cade, seriously?! What the frag? Why? How? ::

::Because I’m just so damn fragging likeable,:: seethed Cade. ::And it’s not my job to tell you how that kind of thing happens. I thought you had that download already.:: After a moment he released the cassette, cycling his vents with a long hostile kind of hum. “Follow me, we’re going on a field trip and you’re going to shut the frag up until we get there and you will stop gloating immediately or I’ll stuff you in a pipe somewhere.”

Which was how the next ten minutes passed in silence while Cade and Windy went to the ground bridge activation panel and departed for the middle of rural China. It was very quiet, humid, no civilization for miles. The heavy greenery of the country side rose up into mountains and it was here that Cade turned to look at Fairwinds and say aloud, “I thought I was going to have to kill him.” As though that were an explanation.

Settling into a perch on an old populus tree at about the mech’s optical height, Fairwinds tucked her wings in with a frown. “And when you didn’t have to... you what? Wished you hadn’t done it?” she asked, her voice turning high and fretful. She’d known her master longer than Barricade, and a lot better, too. Next to surrendering to Optimus, Megatron ever accepting a spark bond again ranked at the top of her ‘things that will never happen, even if the Pit freezes over.’ It was why Barricade was so perfect as a semi-steady partner - he didn’t want commitment, had been scared off it right from the start. He wasn’t going to want anything that couldn’t be given. Except apparently now it had.

Dipping her head she huffed through her vents, talons fidgeting on the branch and peeling away splinters. It felt like this paradigm shift was too massive and strange to ever understand. And it didn’t look like Barricade was dealing with it much better.

“You gonna take off?” Fairwinds asked quietly, lifting her optics to meet his again.

“What? No. Why the frag would I fragging do that? I just got here,” snapped Cade, as though she’d just suggested he bash his faceplates against the rock for the duration of his stay on Earth. The infiltrator shot her a backward look that said clearly he was irritated with her for suggesting it… either because she was dead on or because he legitimately thought it was absurd was impossible to say… even for him. He shook his head, folding his arms across his chest with a rasp of shifting metal and a slight hum and buzz of internal systems settling and revving.

“Besides,” said Cade, tone low with intensity of his focus, so narrow it was a needle point. “I’ve got a job to finish and if this goes like we want the war will end and it won’t matter anymore. We can all be free.” Cade stopped as if that last word carried a sharpness he hadn’t intended or a weight that settling strangely on his glossa. His optics darted toward Fairwinds again, challengingly. “I don’t regret anything. It’s not what I do, but the last thing Megatron needs is his field lieutenant becoming a liability. I don’t have to tell you to keep this to yourself.”

Fairwinds rolled her head back, optics flaring before meeting his gaze coolly again. “Well, obviously. The astrosecond secrecy isn’t the defining term of your ‘relationship’, and I use the term loosely, sparklings and energon gummies are gonna fall out of the sky. It’s not like you’re gonna move in or anything’s gonna be any different, anyway.”

A beat before she straightened with an odd little smirk, the overlapping plates on her breast flaring out with pleasure. “Besides, we’re family now. I gotta keep all your secrets too. That’s how it works.”

Barricade made a low noise, a huff and a rev of deep internal engines.

“There is no such thing anymore,” he said, optics moving out of the landscape of Chinese mountains. There were eons behind them both, enough time and space and atrocity to fill human history books a thousand times over. He could still feel the warlord on the Nemesis on the other side of the world and supposed he would be aware of him from now until his own spark purged into nothing but ozone and broken EM waves. “Not after all this time.”

“You seem pretty sure that there is something, though,” Fairwinds replied carefully, shrinking her posture back down. It wasn’t a meek or defensive pose, but it was a physical yield to Barricade. “I mean, you’ve gambled pretty big that the war’s going to be over, and soon. I’ve never known you to take such big risks in... well, ever.”

Barricade didn’t say anything for a while, just stood there examining nothing in particular. The humidity was getting into his internal systems and his thoughts seemed just as foggy, smeared by heat and disorientation. Cade studied the bizarre configuration of his own head, pulsing with strange math, riddled by new code that had moved into and inhabited him now down to his primary coding. He’d irrecoverably altered himself, bound himself to someone that was – he knew – occasionally sane at best and created in himself the very chink that he exploited on the battle field at every turn.

Why? In his panic or his desperation of that moment why did he do that? It was idiotic. Why did he regret nothing about what he’d done? Cade shook his head slowly.

“Guess I got sick of letting war get in the way of what I want,” said Barricade. “I’m not betting on the war being over… I’m betting it’s never gonna end. Fallen weapon or no.”

Silence for a moment, and then Fairwinds sighed quietly and swooped across to land gently on the mech’s shoulder. She touched the flat of her head to his jaw before settling back. “Well. I don’t think peace is gonna be all that great. I mean, after a couple of centuries when the novelty of crushing the Autoscraps into slag has worn off, it’s probably gonna be pretty boring. Cybertron’s broken, and it’s not like that many mechas in Megatron’s army are going to have the ‘transferable skills’ to fix it.”

“What’s a war machine without war?” asked Cade quietly. He didn’t say anything else for a while, only moving when the heavy clouds overhead opened up and poured the beginning of the region’s monsoon season down on the both of them. The sound of rain hitting their bodies was a low hum, a thousand metal notes struck at once. Cade glanced at the little cassette on his shoulder, watter running down his faceplates. “Let’s go home.”

Fairwinds scuttled down from Barricade’s shoulder a little, enough to see his face clearly when she perked her head up with a smirk. “First, wanna help me shop again? I need, like, thirty microwaves, and my recon. says a lot are made here.”

Cade smiled as he commed for a groundbridge out. “Whatever you need, glitch.”